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Heywood’s songs have generally been seen by literary scholars as essentially harmless evocations of joie de vivre. This chapter looks afresh at their insistent evocation of good-will and harmony, and their rejection of malice, reading them in the light of the repressive legislation of 1533–34, which defined all opposition to the Royal Supremacy or Henry VIII’s second marriage as malicious acts of treason. It also examines the interrogation and trial of Thomas More, and More’s use of good-will as a specific defence against the charge of ‘malicious’ treason. In this context, Heywood’s songs become more pointed and political, an attempt to present himself, and the group of Catholic singing men around St Paul’s cathedral, as innocent of treason, part of a community bound together by values of loyalty, conviviality, and traditional good works of charity and hospitality in the face of increasing pressure on such things from outside.

This chapter sketches what is known of Heywood’s early life and career, taking him from Coventry in the early 1500s to the royal household in the 1520s, setting out both what is known about these early years and what is not. It offers close readings of two short interludes which it is suggested were produced for performance within the humanist circle around John Rastell and Thomas More, possibly on Rastell’s newly built domestic stage at his house in Finsbury Fields. It identifies elements of these early plays that would become characteristic of Heywood’s later dramaturgy, with its subtle, innovative approach to audience engagement.

This chapter looks at Heywood’s remarkable rehabilitation after his abjuration in 1543, and examines in detail his turn to a new literary form with A Dialogue of Proverbs. It offers a new reading of this little-discussed text, setting it in the context of the humanist taste for Adagia, and showing how Heywood parodies the form in a dialogue that cites ‘all the proverbs in the English tongue’ to no final effect. It then looks closely at the subsequent editions of ‘Hundreds’ of Epigrams upon proverbs that the playwright published in subsequent decades, drawing out how they both crafted a new persona for him as purveyor of comic wisdom for ‘the middling sort’ in London, and provided a vehicle for his gradual return to commentary upon social, economic, and religious issues.

Heywood’s last years in exile in the Netherlands are the subject of this penultimate chapter. It looks at his encounter in Mechelen with the English agent (and fellow author) Thomas Wilson, and the plaintive letters that he wrote to Lord Burghley in its aftermath. It traces Heywood’s struggles for financial security after the confiscation of his lands and revenues following his flight into exile, and charts his harrowing experiences during the religious upheavals in Antwerp where he had sought safe haven with his son Ellis in the house of the Jesuits. His final escape to Louvain and the deaths of Ellis and Heywood himself within months of each other in 1578 bring the story of the playwright’s life to an end. ‘Merry’ to the last, Heywood reputedly jested on his deathbed, once more evoking the example of More, who had gone to the scaffold jesting with his captors.

This chapter looks at the increasingly public divisions between the clergy and the laity, conservatives and reformers in the early years of the English Reformation. It charts the role of literary production in both fuelling the hostilities through polemical publications and in attempting to resolve them through a growing literature advocating moderation and tolerance in many aspects of public life. The drama and lyrics of John Heywood are examined as a key example of the latter.

When Edward VI died, Mary Tudor’s chances of merely retaining her freedom, let alone of succeeding her brother on the throne, seemed slim. Her survival and eventual triumph over her enemies must have seemed to her supporters, as it later seemed to Cardinal Reginald Pole preaching to the Lords and Commons in Westminster, clearly providential. Heywood’s response to the accession of his former patron Mary Tudor is the subject of this chapter, which examines accounts of his oration at her coronation and the ballad he wrote to celebrate her marriage to Prince Philip of Spain, the future king Philip I. It suggests the web of delicate irony that the playwright spins in the ballad to place Philip as distinctly ‘second’ to Mary in status and significance, thus supporting the queen’s attempts to counter fears that she would be political subservient to her powerful foreign spouse.

This chapter offers a new reading of this powerful humanist interlude. It argues for Heywood’s authorship in collaboration with his father-in-law John Rastell, who also printed the play. It reads the play in the context of humanist debates about the injustices of contemporary society, and demonstrates that the epilogue effectively reverses the pessimism about the prospects of enacting thoroughgoing reform that characterizes the latter parts of the play. Setting the play in the context of the fall of Wolsey, the summoning of the Reformation Parliament, and the elevation of More to the chancellorship, it argues that the play was written and revised over the autumn of 1529, reflecting the newfound optimism about social reform generated in those months.

This chapter looks in detail at the evidence for Heywood’s involvement in the so called Prebendaries Plot against Thomas Cranmer in the diocese of Kent. It explores the religious divisions that provoked the complaints against Cranmer, and the interrogatories put to those interviewed over their involvement. It offers the first detailed analysis of the charges against Heywood, concluding that the playwright was not involved in any conspiracy against Cranmer, and indeed that describing the events in Kent as a ‘Plot’ is itself potentially misleading. Rather, when finally confronted with the demand that he affirm the Royal Supremacy, Heywood initially refused, and so became a traitor under the terms of the Treason Act of 1534. The chapter describes Heywood’s dramatic appearance on the scaffold with his co-accused, largely fellow members of the More circle, and his subsequent abject public abjuration.

Even if we cannot follow Heywood’s engagement with the fine details of political events in his work in these years in quite the way that we could through his earlier interludes, it is nonetheless possible, and important, to track his path against the wider picture of English Reformation politics, the advance of royal policy and the reactions it provoked, in order to see how the twists and turns of Fortune’s favour affected him, his family, and influential patrons such as Mary Tudor, and how and why Heywood was brought to his own crisis of conscience in the winter of 1543. This chapter examines Heywood’s fortunes in the years following More’s death against the curious contortions of Henry VIII’s religious policy, describing the evolution of Henry’s Erasmian ‘middle way’ in religion, and the tensions that it permitted and exacerbated, setting the scene for Heywood’s condemnation for treason for denying the Royal Supremacy in 1542.

This chapter examines Heywood’s fortunes in the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I, as he strove to maintain his position as a creative artist in a newly Protestant England and began to consider the prospect of exile. Drawing on the remarkable poem, ‘When all that is…’, recently discovered by Jane Flynn, it draws out its implications for our understanding of the playwright’s state of mind as he took stock of his life, offered counsel to those friends and family members remaining in England, and turned his thoughts to exile and the ars moriendi. ‘When all that is…’ suggests a sense of recovery and of resolution at the same time as it speaks of loss and regret. It is the work of a writer who has seemingly at the eleventh hour regained his capacity for linguistic and generic innovation, for word-play, and a characteristically generative ambivalence at the same time as discovering new clarity of faith and purpose.

Philip and Mary’s entry into London on 18^th August reflects the complexity of their reign. Organised by a group of aldermen, including Richard Grafton, Protestant printer of the Great Bible, and John Heywood, Catholic poet and dramatist, it registered the multivocal responses of a city having a plurality of faiths that cut across and were intertwined with commercial and political interests. An anecdote from John Foxe about London’s reception of their new king is shown to be part of a more ambivalent iconography that responded to commercial imperatives while flattering the king with an image in which the crown is delivered into his hands by a figure representing both Mary the queen and the queen of heaven.

This chapter looks at Heywood’s most enigmatic and critically divisive text, the long, allegorical narrative poem, The Spider and the Fly. Against prevailing notions that it is a parable of the Reformation, in which the flies are oppressed Catholics and the arachnids persecuting Protestants, it argues, through a close reading of the poems many twists and turns, that it began as a gentle parody of lawyers’ quibbles, designed for the More circle in the 1520s. This was revisited in the aftermath of the popular rebellions in Cornwall and East Anglia in 1549, and finally repurposed for publication in the mid-1550s, at which point a short ‘conclusion’ was added, which represented the Maid’s last-minute intervention to save the Fly and crush the Spider as a reflection of Mary Tudor’s ‘merciful’ treatment at her accession of those who had conspired to place Jane Grey on the throne. It suggests how the discussion of Mary’s accession is crafted to offer counsel to Mary to take a similarly merciful approach to religious dissenters in the bloody final years of her reign.

The Four PP is perhaps Heywood’s most enigmatic interlude, its disorienting title reflecting a wider lack of apparent cohesion in the work as a whole. This chapter suggests that it is best understood if read in the context of the religious climate of 1527–28, when Thomas More was writing his Dialogue of Heresies, and beginning to rethink the value of Erasmian anti-clerical satire in the light of evangelical reform. It suggests that issues raised by the trial of the young scholar, Thomas Bilney, about the nature of religious truth and the value pilgrimage, miracles, and pardons, inform both More’s text and Heywood’s more playful work. It traces the sources of the playwright’s inspiration in the works of More and Erasmus, and argues that 4PP seeks to retain the mischievous critical edge of a number of Erasmus’s satirical Colloquies without suggesting a fundamental critique of the authority of Church tradition.

This chapter looks back over the previous seven chapters, drawing together a synoptic account of the nature and significance of Heywood’s distinct and coherent body of dramatic compositions. It argues for the formal innovation of the Heywoodian interlude, which draws its inspiration equally from the humanist dialogue, the Erasmian colloquy, Chaucerian satire, and farce, creating in the process a form like no drama before or since. It offers a nuanced account of the cultural work to which Heywood put these plays in troubled times, suggesting that they allowed him, in the spirit of the classical satirist Lucian, to talk about a number of otherwise taboo subjects before audiences in the royal court, the More–Rastell family circle, and the Inns of Court, who would otherwise not have had the licence to acknowledge the novelty, internal contradictions, and frequent absurdities of developments in Church and State.

The conclusion addresses the themes of Erasmianism, identity, comedy, and survival that have run through the book as a whole, suggesting both the achievements and the limitations of Heywood’s life-long attempt to use drama, music, and poetry to address issues of Church and State and to remain true to the idea that writing should always be for the benefit of the commonweal. It offers a summation of the argument of the book as a whole, and makes the case again for the significance of Heywood as a writer, performer, and creative artists, and as a valuable witness to the turbulent history of the Tudor century.

This chapter looks at Heywood’s most abrasive and experimental interlude, which sets a corrupt Pardoner against an enigmatic, elusive Friar in violent dispute over which of them merits alms from the audience. Rather than being merely a disorienting theatrical tour de force, in which both speakers are instructed to preach ‘even at the same time’, the chapter argues that the interlude was prompted by a specific act of bloody sacrilege committed by two priests in 1532. It suggests both the dramaturgical daring and subtlety of the interlude, and its capacity to reflect, powerfully, on the shocking implications of the priests’ violence, and the wider confessional rancour between the clergy and their critics in London in the period.

The final poem that Heywood published during the reign of Mary Tudor, and perhaps the last new poetic work he would publish in his lifetime, was a rather more overtly loyalist and patriotic work, the Brief Ballet [Ballad] touching the Traitorous Taking of Scarborough Castle, printed by Thomas Powell in 1557 and known as ‘Scarborough Warning’. This chapter examines this little-known ballad, which condemns the brief, treasonable seizure of Scarborough Castle by Thomas Stafford and a group of English exiles with French support. It sets the poem’s agenda in the complex circumstances of Anglo-French diplomacy in the later Marian years, and demonstrates how it contributed to the campaign to persuade the privy council and City of London to support Queen Mary’s intention to declare war on France in support of her husband, Philip II.

This chapter sets Heywood’s Play of the Weather in the context of the remarkable opening session of the Reformation Parliament. It reads the play’s opening lines in the context of More’s savage speech describing Wolsey as a ‘great wether’ (castrated ram), and the call for redress of ‘enormities’. It looks at More’s speech, showing for the first time how the sources differ over what More said, and suggesting that More intended at least part of what he said as implied criticism of the king’s position rather than celebration of it. It suggests Heywood, inspired and provoked by the terms of the speech, offered the court a play that also gently ironized Henry VIII’s self-serving claims, and shows how Heywood may have revised the play in 1533, adding material that gently satirized the king’s secret marriage to Anne Boleyn and his claims to be Supreme Head of the Church.

This chapter argues that the fall of Wolsey and the promotion of More to the chancellorship also inform Heywood’s next major dramatic work, A Play of Love. Evidently designed for performance either at Lincoln’s Inn or on Rastell’s household stage, the play offers a parodic legal moot on the question of happiness and unhappiness in love. But it also offers sharp satire of the judicial methods allegedly characteristic of Wolsey’s conduct in the courts of Chancery and Star Chamber, and offers sober counsel to More as he prepared to take on the responsibility of presiding over the ‘courts of conscience’ in Wolsey’s stead.